News Story

Funcom very confident there'll be no Age of Conan launch issues

Aside from being rather excited their greatest creation is almost ready to fling open its virtual barbarian gates, Funcom say they’ve taken many steps to keeps things running.

"The biggest issue is the unknown," says product director Jorgen Tharaldsen, speaking at the launch in Oslo, Norway.

May 17 - Day One of Conan's official online traipsing is geared up to serve 600,000 users after Funcom ready their hardware to cope with eager gamers who paid for early access codes.

"What happens when you have 500,000 people trying to go into the same door? We went through this before with Anarchy Online back in 2001 and that was a gruelling experience. We thought we knew a lot but we didn't know anything when the systems really started to burn."

"Now we have a back up on the back up on the back up. If this happens we do this, these are the people responsible, this is how you do it, this is the hardware. If the forums go down we have four servers, smack, bang. If our websites gets issues, shut it down, this is the temporary, emergency website. If this server gets filled up it gets cycled back to the bottom. If there's too many people, this is the queue system, etc etc etc."

"We've been about a year working on the launch. We have our own launch groups, our own beta meetings, we meet pretty much every day. We go through, OK what's important, how do we do it, how do we prep our systems? We've been burnt before and we're trying to ensure that if there are mistakes and holes that we didn't see coming they are most likely stopped. But hopefully we have guarded ourselves and cast such a wide net that we will be able to pick up stuff quite fast."

Age of Conan is a hotly anticipated MMORPG and received over 1 million beta signups, the largest recorded number in the genres history. It's no secret then that any hiccups are likely to lead to a full bloodthirsty revolt by Conan's loyal subjects - good luck Funcom!

Click here to visit the official Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures website.